This distribution is only for x86 PC machines. Volunteers interested in ports to other architectures are eagerly sought.

We are no longer actively developing version 1.x of GNU Mach. We plan to make only necessary bug fixes or trivial enhancements in the 1.x line, and make further 1.x releases only as necessary for those purposes. New development efforts have been underway for some time on a new version of GNU Mach using the OSKit from the University of Utah for hardware support. Those efforts previously called OSKit-Mach are now working towards the future version 2.0 of GNU Mach.

Aside from bug fixes, major changes from 1.2 (from the NEWS file) are:

The kernel now directly supports "boot scripts" in the form of multiboot module names with the same syntax as the Hurd's `serverboot' program. That is, instead of telling GRUB "module /boot/serverboot", you can give GRUB a series of command like "module /hurd/ext2fs ${...}" where the syntax after "module" is the same as in boot scripts for Hurd's `serverboot'.

The kernel message device `kmsg' is now enabled by default. --disable-kmsg turns it off.

Large disks (>= 10GB) are now correctly supported, the new get_status call DEV_GET_RECORDS can return the number of records of a device.

Lots of tweaks have been done to the virtual memory management to make it perform better on today's machines.

The console supports ANSI escape sequences for colors and attributes.

Support for the terminal speeds B57600 and B115200 has been added.

Bug reports relating to this distribution should be sent to bug-hurd@gnu.org. Requests for assistance should be made on help-hurd@gnu.org.